by Jeff Povey
Together with the photograph, I also have three letters in my pocket that I have written to Betty. I’ve got three because I don’t know which sounds more appropriate.
Dear Betty,
Please find enclosed a photo of your half-brother, Tony. I took it the other night. I can tell you I was as shocked as anyone. What should we do?
Yours sincerely,
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Betty,
It’s your favorite person ever here. Thought you might be interested in this photograph. It proves beyond all doubt that Tony, your half-brother, is the RAT!!!!!!! I don’t think this is the way the Club chairman should behave, do you?
Talk soon,
Doug
My dearest Betty,
I don’t know what to say. It’s tragic. Truly and hideously tragic. I’m afraid I lied to you about being blackmailed. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to show you what Tony, your half-brother, has been doing. But I can’t live with this knowledge or my guilt in lying to you any longer.
WE MUST MEET!!!! I’m going crazy keeping all of this to myself.
Poor Burt . . . I really liked that guy.
Yours with faith (and not a little hope),
Douglas
P.S. I also liked Tallulah, Errol, Richard, Will, Carole, Cher, and all the others Tony must have murdered.
The last letter seems to me to have hit the right note and says all the things I think need to be said.
I had intended to just leave the letter and the envelope at the library for Betty, but as soon as I step inside I get this huge urge to seek her out. I badly want to see her, and I quickly sweep my matted hair into an effective Agent Wade style.
Betty is browsing through Potted History of Italian Clay Pots when I eventually find her. The lights are low, and the library is surprisingly warm. She has removed her crocheted shawl, and I note that she is wearing a rust-colored satin-look blouse that shimmers whenever she moves.
“Hi . . .”
“Douglas?”
“Am I disturbing you?”
“No . . . not at all. I was just filing stuff.”
“You don’t mind my coming here?”
“It’s nice to see you.”
I warm to this, start to relax. “Well . . . it’s nice to see you, too.”
I sit at one of the study desks. Betty remains standing, and I find that her bosom is now directly at my eye level, some six inches away. To my consternation, it is extremely hard to look anywhere else.
I feign a big “someone’s just walked over my grave” shiver. “Things are really getting spooky, Betty. I needed to talk to someone. Can’t quite figure out what’s going on.”
“Well, I sure can. We’re being stalked, Douglas. I know it.”
“You think?”
“What else can it be?”
“Heard from Tony?”
“Nothing. He won’t answer my calls, is never at his desk. I can’t find out anything from him.”
I look down at the study desk and notice someone has gouged “Murder Rap Murders Music!” into the wood veneer.
Betty looks so scared and vulnerable that I want to reach out for her and hold her in my arms. Instead my hand slips into my jacket pocket.
“Listen . . . I, uh . . . I think I might have found a reason for Tony lying low.”
“Really?”
“Yeah . . . I don’t think you’re going to like it, though.”
“I’m feeling lousy anyway, so what difference will it make?”
“This is major league lousy.”
Betty sighs, looks into the distance. “Whatever happened to the good things in life?”
The Club members happened.
“Maybe it’d better wait. This is a bad moment. I’ll show you another time.”
“Show me what?”
“This.” The photograph is out of my pocket before I know it. I thrust it into Betty’s hands before I’ve even had a chance to think it through. She is so shocked by the picture, she stands motionless for several seconds before fishing out her cigarettes and lighting one nervously. And this is despite the NO SMOKING sign plastered to the wall only inches from Betty’s head.
“Oh God . . . no . . .”
“When you called I just had this weird feeling. Tony never liked Burt . . . well, no one did, really, but Tony totally hated him.”
“He never told me that.”
“Tony tells me everything. We’re real tight.” I twist my first two index fingers in that age-old hand gesture that shows just how compatible two men can be. Though I have to admit, I don’t understand how what basically looks like one flesh-colored snake mating with another could ever be truly representative of male bonding.
Betty looks a little vague, unconvinced. “How did you come by this photo, Douglas?”
“I worked on the theory that because Tony told you he smelled a rat, he was very probably smelling himself. So I followed him one night, having the hindsight to take a Kodak camera and special night film with me.”
“Foresight.”
“What?”
“You had the foresight. You only have hindsight after the event.” Betty’s voice is weak, troubled. Smoke curls mockingly in front of the NO SMOKING sign.
“Well, whatever—my sight was good enough to get this picture.”
I can feel myself reddening, hoping Betty’s going to buy this. She glances back at the photograph, and the shock wave hits her for the second time. “Jesus.”
“I, uh, I wrote this to go with the picture.”
I hand her the letter I wrote. In fact, I hand her all three, and she looks confused, not knowing which one to read first. I realize my mistake, grab the letters back, sift through them, and then hand her the right one.
“Yeah, here it is. This one. I wrote this to you.”
Betty reads the letter and looks as though she is going to faint. I pull out the chair next to mine, and she sits down on it, heavily. She holds the photo and the letter limply, stares ahead, wondering what on earth she did to deserve all this. Half a dozen murders at the last count.
“I’d say it was pretty conclusive. Wouldn’t you?” I try my best not to ram home the point, but I’m also aware that I need to make sure she gets the gist of it.
“You couldn’t get a more complete picture of a rat at work.”
“But why’s he doing it, Douglas? Why’s Tony killing the members? I thought he loved the Club?”
That’s a very good point, and one that I truly don’t have an answer for. I try to buy myself time by pretending to fall into a sudden and deep thought. “Mmm . . . well . . . there’s all sorts of reasons, I guess. The strongest being that he does seem to enjoy killing people. And to be honest, Tony doesn’t really have a set pattern—he just kills anyone that takes his fancy.”
“But eventually he’ll have no Club left. There’ll only be him.”
“They say creative people are very destructive.”
“Tony’s not creative. Show him a work of art and he’d try and eat it.” Betty gives me a slightly dismissive look, and I admit it was a weak thought.
“What theories have you got, then?” I decide to put the ball right back in Betty’s court. “Why do you think he’s doing it? You’ve read a lot of books.”
Betty takes her time, still reeling from the shock of the photographs. “I dunno . . . I really don’t. It’s not the brother I know.”
“Half know—he’s a half-brother, remember?”
Betty doesn’t bother responding to that, which is a shame because it’s a pretty clever play on words. I glance at the photographs, give a big shrug and a loud tut.
“Poor old Burt, huh? I really liked that guy. I was truly fond of him.”
“Me too.”
I knew it! Boy, am I glad that round-shouldered, wiry-haired freak is dead.
“He made me laugh. I, uh . . . I don’t meet a lot of men who can do that.”
“You, uh . . . you like to laugh, then?”
/>
“Who doesn’t?” She says this wearily, and I step in quickly, ready to lift her spirits.
“Listen, did you ever hear the one about the guy who gets hit by a golf ball? I mean, this guy that hits this golf ball? You heard this? You’ll love it—”
“To be honest, I don’t think I’m in the mood right now, Douglas.”
I give Betty a reassuring grin. “Everyone loves this joke. So this guy hits this golf ball and misses the course completely. The ball sails off onto a nearby highway and bounces through the windshield of a bus. The bus goes out of control, skids across a junction, and causes a major pileup. The golfer—the guy who originally hit the golf ball—eventually finds his ball nestling into the by now dead bus driver’s ear, and he turns to his caddie and says, ‘My God . . . what do I do now? I mean—my God!’” I grin from ear to ear, proving beyond any doubt that I can make Betty laugh as much as Burt ever did.
Betty doesn’t seem to be listening, though. She has drifted off, staring into the aisles, letting her thoughts mingle with the words in the books, letting them become integrated and jumbled until they are meaningless. I know I have to shake her out of her terrible inner torment. I nudge her a couple of times, trying hard to take her mind off her half-brother.
“So the caddie—you’ll die, Betty, believe me, you’re going to die—the caddie carefully surveys the situation and then looks at the golfer. ‘You’ll need your eight-iron for this shot.’”
I laugh, slap my thigh, and then notice that Betty still seems distant and pained, looking beyond me. She really must be down, because everyone I tell that joke to normally creases up.
“We’ll have to kill him, Douglas. . . .” The words seem to come out of Betty’s mouth without her lips moving, a low, guttural murmur.
I pause a moment. “Tony?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, Betty, that’s a tall order. Can’t we just run away somewhere?”
“We could . . .” I like the way she says “we.” “But that’d be unfair to the others.”
“Let’s invite them along.”
Betty glances back at the incriminating photo and gives a faint shudder. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
I seize my chance and reach out for Betty. My arm slips around her waist. She doesn’t resist—in fact, she leans into me, and we stay like that for a good ten minutes until a fair-haired man appears and asks us to direct him to the canine reference section. It is only when he sees the photographs of Burt’s decapitation that he realizes he is asking the wrong people.
Originally, I had intended to jog home from the library because I felt like I needed a good long run to clear my head. But when I get outside, I feel as weak as a kitten, can barely stand up. I feel like someone trapped in the eye of a hurricane; the world is spinning around me, and the air is getting sucked from my lungs. I hail a cab and quickly wind the windows down, not caring that the rain is getting in. I don’t know how long I sat with Betty, my arm around her waist, just staring out into nothingness, but it is now very dark out.
As we move through the night traffic, the driver talks constantly, speaking rapidly, punching his words out.
“Fuckin’ Kentucky Killer. Fuckin’ killed another one today. Some Puerto Rican-Mexican sleaze bag. Fuckin’ goin’ for the three hundred, you ask me.”
I look up and study the grease that sits on top of the driver’s hair. It is so thick, it glistens in the glow of the streetlamps we pass under. I have this mad impulse to force him to drive through a car wash keeping the windows down, and if I had a gun with me, I probably would.
“Fuckin’ has to come to our fuckin’ town, don’t he? That’s my favorite fuckin’ restaurant as well. . . .”
Lemon-scented hand wipes.
The words keep appearing in front of me, even written in the grease of the driver’s hair.
Lemon-scented hand wipes.
“Fuckin’ murdering scum. Why’d he have to pick KFC? Why not BK or McDonald’s? Why’s it have to be my fuckin’ favorite restaurant in the whole entire world?”
Lemon-scented hand wipes.
“The whole entire universe, in fact. Fuckin’ killjoy. I’m gonna take a gun with me next time I eat out.”
The world has become a dark and fearful place. I look out at the empty buildings we drive past, see people wandering through the night; most are the dregs of humanity, the offspring of a lost society. I see two teenage prostitutes leaning in the car of a cigar smoker. His hand plays with the blond girl’s long hair, twisting it in his fingers, pulling it to his eyelids, and running the golden strands over them. The other girl is a redhead with what can only be called a Vietnam stare, and I have this hopeless thought that maybe she isn’t what I think she is.
“I’ve been with those two. . . .” The taxi driver beeps his horn and waves a cigarette-stained hand at the girls. Neither bothers to look up. “I’ve been with them both. They do a discount if you take them both together. Two for the price of one and a half.”
The driver lets out a low chuckle to himself, and I crane my neck back to try to look at the girls before they fade into the night.
“It’s the supermarkets, they’re hittin’ everybody.”
The grease-haired driver doesn’t realize that I suddenly want to cry, that I know without question that James Mason was right when he said he thought Armageddon was coming. In truth, it’s here already; you just have to look at the faces on those girls to know that.
IT LIVES
A DRIPPING WET Agent Wade sits staring at the television screen, only this time there isn’t anything on. The screen is as blank as his expression. He doesn’t acknowledge me as I walk in. I’m not sure what to say to him and cross the room in the hope that I can get to my bedroom before either of us has to say a word to each other. My hand is on the door handle when his voice stops me.
“Doesn’t it ever stop raining in this city?”
“Never.”
I don’t want to look at Agent Wade, fearing that if I do, I’ll see him for who he truly is.
“Washes away our sins, I guess.”
I nod mutely.
“And all evidence that we were ever here.”
I force myself to turn and look at Agent Wade and can see that he is actually staring at his reflection in the television screen, that his eyes search out and trace every line of his handsome face.
“You hungry?” I can’t think of a single thing to say apart from that.
“I ate out.”
“Anywhere nice?”
“Best restaurant in town.”
I nod, again mutely.
Agent Wade surprises me by quickly turning and looking at me. He wipes away drops of rain that have run into the light wrinkles under his eyes. “You’re sure going to be a hero, Dougie.”
I shrug. “Who’ll ever know?”
“The victims that will never be because of you.”
Agent Wade reaches for a bottle of gin that I hadn’t seen and raises it to his lips. The bottle is half-empty, and now I understand why he’s suddenly started spouting this dreadful but poetic garbage.
“Want to put some music on?”
“I was going to sit in my room for a bit. Maybe read.”
Agent Wade glances to the rain-lashed window. “Ever wonder how many killers are out there? Everyone has a mother, ergo everyone has a need to kill.”
“That go for you, too?” The question’s out before I can stop myself.
Agent Wade just smiles at this, says nothing.
As I stand there studying him, I start to appreciate fully that I am the only man standing between a peaceful world and years of KFC-oriented murders. I will be the man who killed the man who killed the many.
I walk over to the window as I hear the distant chimes of a church clock striking midnight. I look outside and see a prostitute, or a girl who’s trying to look like one, getting frog-marched into the back of a cop car by a burly Popeye-armed cop. The cop’s partner, a female cop whom I woul
d love to have dinner with one night if I weren’t seeing Betty, is kicking in the car headlights of the girl’s bemused-looking pimp. I open the window and call out to them.
“Excellent work, Officers. Excellent work.”
The cops look over at me, and I give them a big grin and a wave. They say nothing as they climb into their car and drive off, windshield wipers on fast speed.
I turn and look back at Agent Wade, peering down at him, and know that I’m not afraid. That cometh the hour, cometh Demon Dougie.
JAMES MASON
A SLIGHTLY SMALLER MEETING
THE WORLD HAS BECOME a rain-eroded Roman amphitheater. There are Christians and there are lions and in between there is me. That’s the only way I can think to describe what is happening. I’m four kills away from Doomsday. I note that there is only one member of the nerdy quiz team left, and both the manager and headwaiter of the bar and grill have been replaced by new personnel who seem keen on tearing down the wooden veneer of the bar and grill and replacing it with shiny black-and-white ceramic tiles. When the workmen eventually finish, it will be like eating in an elegant washroom.
I should be happy that this is nearly over. All I’ve got to do is kill James Mason, Tony Curtis, Chuck Norris, and then . . . I can’t bring myself to think about it. I glance at Betty.
God, no.
Smoke rises steadily from five cigarettes, rising high enough to stain the new tiles. James dunks teabags into a cup of hot water and seems concerned that he can’t make the tea strong enough. “It’s weak, Mother—it’s weak. Just look at it. It’s like water, I tell you.”